Once Upon A Time
by StArBarD
Summary: When Sherlock and John recieve a package containing Moriarty's Fairy tale book, strange crimes start poping up all over London. A wolf delivers a body wraped in a red cloak to Scotland yard; a woman is killed, her two daughters mutilated and her step daughter kidnapped. I'm terrible at writing summaries. Can Sherlock and John give this tale a happily ever after? K for blood.
1. Chapter 1 : The Game is on!

"Sherlock?" John called to his flat mate across the kitchen.

Sherlock groaned in reply.

"Sherlock?" John called a bit more forcefully.

"What?" Sherlock snapped.

"That can't be good for the sofa."

Sherlock stared at his flat mate from where he was lounging upside down across the couch, his feet were dangling in the empty air and his head hovering inches above the floor, coal-black curls sweeping across the dusty surface lazily.

"Well, John, what the sofa doesn't know won't hurt him!" he barked.

John rolled his eyes and set his cup of tea on one of the few clear spaces on the kitchen table. The rest of the table had become a veritable swamp of tubes, glass vials and pipettes; all left-overs from one of the largest chemical experiments John had ever seen Sherlock do. It literally took three days, and Sherlock was awake and working the whole time. John would pass by the kitchen in the evening and early morning on his way to work and find him moving slowly, observing the reactions diligently and writing down his observations monotonously. It was at these times John would liken Sherlock to a robot more than a man.

He watched him on the last hour of the last day of his experiment, when Sherlock should have been collapsing from exhaustion and starvation. The man was gaunt, paler than usual, but radiating a previously untapped energy that made him tremble with expectation. His eyes were blazing with subtle anticipation and his fierce gaze was fixed on the broiling glass beaker, which lit up dully above the weak orange flame.

His breath escaped his lips in a subtle shudder, as his long, white finger danced over the piston of the syringe. The suspense was etched clearly across his face; every feature was as still and immobile as a stone as the final stage of the experiment was finally upon him.

Gently—very gently—Sherlock squeezed. Clear liquid spurted from the stem of the needle, splashing onto the thick blue substance in the beaker, and then suddenly the entire solution turned bright yellow.

John didn't pretend to have a clue as to what Sherlock might have been experimenting on (or about) but he could tell it was a success when the usually withdrawn man leapt into the air, whooping with delight, dropping the syringe and clapping his hands together triumphantly.

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" he shouted full of joy.

John stood back sipping tea and smiling. More than half of Scotland Yard was convinced that Sherlock was a real sociopath, but it was moments like these that reminded John just how human he could be.

But of course, after the work came the depression.

It had been fairly bad this time, and John could see that the lack of work was taking its toll on Sherlock. The wall was in shambles, the strings on his precious violin had been sawed through with hours and hours of violent playing which had driven John from the flat, and the room itself was in ruins from where Sherlock had torn apart everything looking for his cigarettes.

"I need some! Get me some!" Sherlock demanded upside-down. His cheeks had taken on a rare rosy hue from all of the blood rushing to his head.

"I'll give you something…" John muttered angrily.

"Make it cigarettes!" Sherlock shouted.

"No."

Sherlock flipped himself over and in a flash he was standing, in the next second he was pacing, like a caged animal.

"Moriarty's minions are out there somewhere, but the streets are completely silent, Scotland Yard could have a holiday, there hasn't been so much as a jay-walking in weeks! I'm tearing myself apart! Cigarettes!"

"Maybe Moriatry's evil plan was to make you go crazy from boredom all along. Don't give in Sherlock; you're playing right into his hands!" John smiled from above his tea and drained it in one gulp.

Sherlock glared at him, daring him to test him today. He was as moody as a school girl and John knew that he should try to tiptoe around him, lest he should explode.

Suddenly Sherlock bound across the kitchen in three long-legged strides. John looked up and Sherlock was peering into his face, expression completely unreadable.

"Oh, How I envy you John."

"You envy me?"

"It must be so nice to be so stagnant for so long. It must be so peaceful in your little brain."

John scoffed as he moved around Sherlock to deliver his cup to the sink. "No need to be rude, I'm sure something will come up for you soon."

John heard footsteps and looked up expectantly towards the door, could the answer to his prayers possibly have come so soon?

"It's just Mrs. Hudson." Sherlock said reading John's expression.

"Package for you Sherlock." Mrs. Hudson cheerfully called into the flat.

"Leave it there Mrs. Hudson." Sherlock exclaimed, immediately seeming more jovial, leaping over one of the chairs and practically running to his room.

"Were you expecting something Sherlock?" John asked, fearful of another round of experiments.

"Nope!" Sherlock called from his room.

"Then why are you..." But his flat mate was already gone and his bedroom door closed with a snap. "Okay…" John muttered dismayed.

John picked up Sherlock's package from the table and weighed it in his hand.

"Thanks Mrs. Hudson." He said. She nodded cheerfully and exited the flat as quickly as she had entered.

"Heavy, small, dense…" John tallied his own deductions in his head as he flipped the package over in his hands. "Man's handwriting on the postage; very neat though…Ah, a book."

"It's a book Sherlock." John sang across the flat, for once proud to have deduced something before his slightly-amazing flat mate.

"Really, what book?" Sherlock called back.

"Can I open this?"

"You haven't opened it?"

"No."

"Then by all means…" he said casually emerging from his bedroom fully clothed in a suit, smoothing down nonexistent creases elegantly.

John tore away the brown paper in narrow strips and placed them carefully in the waste-basket. He knew that if he didn't ensure the paper was in the basket now, he would find them again on the floor later, another random piece of junk added to the collection that was forever building at 221b.

When he had completely uncovered the title of the story he almost dropped the book, which instantly seemed to take on a more significant weight.

"Sherlock…This book…"

"Yes John?"

"This is THE book," He exclaimed holding it arm's length, as though it were faintly poisonous "It's Moriarty's book, the one from the case with..."

"I know the one. Thanks."

John glanced over the cover once more, searching for anything, _anything_, which would suggest a prank or a switch.

Beige, hardback, thick, with a green wreath around the title "Grimm's Fairy Tales."  
In truth it could have been just another book; no doubt that more were published than just the one Moriarty chose to use, but the edges had been damaged by time and repeated use.

And John had seen the book; all objects from the fall incident, really, in his dreams for months. He knew just by looking, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that that book was THE book.

Sherlock eased the book out of his hands and turned it over a few times, scanning it mutely with his eagle eyes, picking out little details invisible to John's limited observational skills.

"How did it get out of evidence locker?" John asked, his eyes flashing from Sherlock to the book, anticipating some great deduction that would somehow give light to something yet unknown.

"No idea." Sherlock said opening the cover and flipping lazily to the table of contents.

"Do you think it's Jim?"

"Obviously." Sherlock snapped, a bit unkindly.

"So he's alive…" John murmured worriedly. He'd actually been afraid of just that for some time, but it seemed silly to say anything.

After all, the newspapers and the telly had both confirmed that Jim Moriarty was stone cold dead upon the roof.

There had been no doubt from either Lestrade or Molly on that point.

But then again, the same was also said of Sherlock Holmes.

"I'm not sure." Sherlock said shutting the book and tucking it under his arm. "It's not like he's the ONLY criminal out there ready to mess with us. It could easily be one of his clients or minions hungry for revenge."

John scoffed. "Would you PLEASE not sound so…so…" he searched a moment for a good word "…excited about this? This might be serious!"

It was Sherlock's turn to scoff, and turn up his chin for good measure. "Ha! Serious? How? No one could possibly pose as much of a threat as Moriarty. Plus, if I'm not mistaken they've given us the whole premise for their plans right here!"

He knocked against the book's hard cover and it make a hallow sound; a sound that was so perfectly normal and safe that John faltered momentarily in his conviction that the book itself held some of the malice and evil that its previous owner had instilled.

"Besides. Even if the papers and the news cannot be trusted, you know you can trust me, John. I _saw _him."

Sherlock was now staring at John intently from across the room. His eyes were like blazing chips of ice that bore into John's forehead as he took a seat in his favorite chair.

"I saw him. I saw the gun. I saw the blood. I saw the…" Sherlock (unbelievably) paused for a moment, reliving the day and remembering the experiences. "The…the light, if you will, leave his eyes."

Sherlock moved solemnly across the room. He seemed to be almost floating, with only the occasional dirge-like tapping of his expensive shoes against the floor to suggest he was physically moving at all. The excitement had all but left his eyes, but the traces of mirth still tugged at the corners of his mouth.

John could see, he was happy to have a case (?) but more than frightened at the possibility of Moriarty being involved.

Anyone else would have missed the almost indistinguishable signs of emotion on the mask-like face of Sherlock Holmes, but John wasn't just anyone.

"All right. I believe you." John said. And it was true for the most part; he did believe in Sherlock Holmes.

But when cases involved Moriarty, there was little John found to be unbelievable.

Though for the moment his fears were abated.

"Okay… So what about the book?" John asked.

"I need more data." Sherlock said with a wave of his hands.

"So you don't know?"

He was rewarded with a scathing look. "No, I need more Data before I can draw any conclusions. Conclusions at this point would be erroneous."

"If you don't know it's okay to say you don't know." John pressed, fighting the smile that was turning up the corners of his lips.

"Data, data, data! I cannot make bricks without clay! I need DATA John! Without Data one inevitably begins to twist facts to suit conclusions instead of conclusions to suit facts!"

Sherlock stormed back to his room still raging about data while John smiled softly. Oh, how he had missed this. The banter, the tired sayings, the hair-trigger temper-tantrums.

Then suddenly Sherlock's booming voice halted and invited jarring silence in its place. The only noise John heard was the far-distant roar of cars on the street and the melodic ringing of Sherlock's cell phone.

"Aha!" he heard Sherlock whisper under his breath.

John stood up and reached for his wallet which was resting on the coffee table. When you live with Sherlock Holmes 'Aha' can only mean one thing, a case.

"John!" Sherlock boomed, "Grab your…" He walked out of his room just in time to see John hurriedly shove his wallet into his coat pocket. "Um…yeah." He said nodding affirmatively. "We're off to New Scotland Yard!"

#

Sherlock was silent, apart from hailing the taxi, all the way to Broadway when he suddenly and unexpectedly started to chatter excitedly about the case to himself.

"Someone with a mole perhaps, either that of someone with an accomplice with the police, or maybe just one man with the most revolutionary programming skills and excellent timing."

"What?" John asked.

"Though how he wouldn't catch it… I told him he needed to screen his men better…"

"What." John asked again, increasingly irritated.

The timing was remarkably efficient, which suggests a mole…"

"Am I still here? You can see me can't you?" John asked with a bit of anger biting at his words. He was tired of feeling invisible.

"Did you bring your gun?" Sherlock said suddenly turning to him.

"What? No! Should I have?" John asked.

"No, no…" Sherlock said turning and staring at the passing streets out the window. "It's probably nothing."

The three words which scared John Watson the most when uttered by Sherlock Holmes: "_It's probably nothing_."

#

John paid the cabbie as they both stepped out into the crisp London air. A mysterious breeze hinted at the oncoming autumn and miraculously seemed to carry away the ever-present scent of smog and smoke that seemed so entwined with John's perception of London. It seemed like a fresh new city.

Sherlock strode past the rotating sign with renewed vigor and nodded at the security guard outside the visitor's entrance who already had some idea of why he was there.

Well, more of an idea than John at the moment anyway.

#

Detective Inspector Lestrade ran the tips of his fingers through his choppy gray hair. He was being forced to swallow hell from three different people at one time and he didn't know how much more he could possibly take.

Then he turned and saw Sherlock strolling through the crowd of policemen with the eager, hungry gleam twinkling in his eyes; looking, for all purposes, like a dark bird of prey.

Lord help him.

#

"What happened?" Sherlock slammed the question into him as soon as Lestrade could elbow and argue his way into his office.

"Well, hello to you too." He said gruffly, more than a little bit put off.

"Good morning Lestrade." John said with a pleasant smile.

"Good morning John."

"Yes, yes, the morning is fine!" Sherlock snapped "What happened?"

Lestrade breathes deeply, letting the cool air placate his hot nerves.

"This morning, in the wee hours a little after two, Scotland Yard had a bomb scare."

"Here?" John exclaimed glancing about, as if he could suddenly identify invisible damage from the bomb.

"No, out back a bit, past parking. Someone placed a mysterious package right beneath the windows where the anti-terrorism posters are hung up."

"The ones for the anti-terrorism hotline?"

"Precisely." Lestrade nodded grimly.

"So someone with an acute sense of irony, that should narrow it down a bit." Sherlock said smirking.

"Hold on, I'm not finished yet." Lestrade said, wishing more and more with every passing moment that he had opted for that last cup of coffee instead of pouring back in the pot.

"While all the officers were preoccupied, someone delivered a body to the visitor's entrance."

"Wait…" John said "Delivered?"

"Plopped her right down on the welcome mat." Lestrade nodded for emphasis.

"Interesting." Sherlock smiled a bit.

"And no one noticed?" John looked worriedly from Lestrade to Sherlock as the older man adopted the countenance of disbelief.

"No. Frankly they were a bit concerned with no getting their arses blown off."

"You were at home?" Sherlock asked.

"I'm not here all the time, you know."

"Right, right. Who was it?" Sherlock said picking up a folder off of Lestrade's desk and sitting right next to his computer while flipping through it with the air of boredom.

We're checking for ID now; no clue who she is yet, but that's not the strangest part."

"Oh really, what's the strangest part?" Sherlock asked glancing up carelessly at Lestrade.

Lestrade leaned over the desk, knowing full well that this final twist in the strange case would insatiably hook Sherlock's interest.

"She was wrapped up in a red blanket…and delivered by a _wolf_!"

Sherlock glanced up into empty air blankly; his mind was racing to comprehend the data he'd just been given.

"What?"

I'll show you the surveillance. Lord knows those cameras can explain better than I can.

"I thought you didn't have footage?" Sherlock shot at him.

"I didn't either," Lestrade admitted "We thought for sure that we had checked all CCTV cameras, but a few hours into the hunt we received an anonymous tip and hunted down the one camera that wasn't knocked down."

"The cameras were knocked down?" John asked trying to piece together the story of the night from the feeble blips of information he was being given.

"The power to the whole bloody street was knocked down! Can you imagine, defusing a bomb in the pitch blackness without even the street lamps to go by?" Lestrade ushered them into another room where a small telly had been set up. "I'm glad I wasn't about, or else I might've had a heart attack!"

Sherlock picked up the remote, ignoring Lestrade for the moment and mashed the buttons haphazardly. The long-suffering Detective Inspector swiped the remote from the consulting detective's hands and the scene from the night before came to life on screen.

#

A bald man in a dress shirt and tie jogged down the side walk on Broadway, sweat pouring down his face and his (frankly alarming) pockets of fat jiggling dramatically as he ran, fists pumping rhythmically in time with the noticeable puffs of breath he sucked in and pushed out of his corpulent cheeks.

The man ran, in just that fashion off screen, when the lights suddenly cut out and the whole telly faded to blackness.

Sherlock leaned in extremely close to the screen, blocking Lestrade's view with his mop of unruly black curls, but the older man didn't mind. He's already reviewed the footage no less than a dozen times.

He knew that once the camera had adjusted to the darkness the only light would be the eerie silvery glow from the distant moon that had somehow broken through the London clouds and smog, if only for a few moments in order to cast it's luminous beams on the shiny black car that slowly drives along the front of the building; invisible, except for the reflection of the moon dancing across it's highly polished surface.

Then, suddenly; a streetlight flickers to life, throwing a harsh orange cone of light onto the gray sidewalk. The silhouette of the car is clear against the pavement and with one smooth, seamless gesture the backdoor of the car swings open effortlessly and –something- crawls out of the back seat.

That something straightens up and stands, revealing it to be the figure of a man carrying a bundle tucked into the crook of its arms.

The bundle is odd, full of lumps and strange, disproportionate bulges that make it difficult to identify as anything in particular.

The man is odder. The face is completely silhouetted, but even so it is no great deduction to infer that something is horribly, horribly wrong with that face. It is a massive, ambiguous shape that one cannot possibly identify.

The man-thing steps further into the cone of garish light and suddenly, like a curtain rising to a picture show, every gruesome feature is explicitly put on display in all of the camera's high resolution glory.

A long gray muzzle of hard wrinkled skin pokes out of brown hair so shaggy and bristly it looks like a wig of needles. White, jagged teeth ooze out of the partially opened mouth, jutting in dangerous directions and giving the already-horrifying face a crooked countenance. Rage is perpetually etched onto the hideous mask and around the soulless black eye-holes.

The wolf-man gazes around suspiciously, passing over every feature of the sleeping dark city with expressionless eyes. Then he shakes his head violently in a spasm of twisted delight and lumbers forward in great leaping steps, almost as though he was actually having trouble walking on two feet instead of four paws.

The creature works his way to the lower right hand corner of the screen where the visitor's entrance door is located and he unceremoniously drops the bundle, seemingly losing his balance at the same time and falling onto his hands over top of the thing.

The bundle has now unraveled just a tad, and something falls out of it just within the range of the camera. To anyone paying close attention, like, say, a Detective Inspector who had watched the tape no less than one dozen times, the thing that now lies on the concrete is painfully obviously a limp white human arm.

The wolf-man presses the snout of his mask into the bundle and pretends to sniff it for a moment, milking his role as wolf for as long as possible before leaping up and running on all fours to the center of the screen, just like a dog.

When the wolf hits the dead center of the screen he pauses and looks up at the camera furtively over his shoulder, proving that he knew it was there the whole time.

The wolf stops and crouches on his knees, arms clutching the empty air with gnarled fingers, made to appear like claws.

In one sweeping gesture he arches his back and bows his head, bringing it up again in a graceful crescent.

To Sherlock who had never seen a horror movie in his life, this action was nearly inexplicable, but to Greg and John the resemblance was all too clear.

It was howling.

#

Greg turned off the telly and turned the lights back on.

"I told you it was an odd one." He said nodding again, as if re-confirming that fact.

John watched Sherlock nervously. The man hadn't moved or said one word, but something in his manner had made John anxious, like a red flag had triggered somewhere in his brain.

"Any thoughts on the off-hand?" Greg asks thoughtlessly scratching his nose. When there is no response he turned and faced the detective, who still leaned into the black, silent screen; his hands were steeped beneath his chin.

"Sherlock?" He asked curiously stepping forward. John waved his hands and motioned a very silent, very clear "No."

Now was not the time to disturb him, he was deep, deep in thought. His mouth was moving rapidly, but no sound was coming out.

Greg looked from Sherlock to John, completely abashed to the former's new and frankly startling behavior. John shrugged in resignation, and flashed a brief apologetic smile at the nervous D.I.

"John…" Sherlock suddenly spoke in a startlingly soft and hesitant voice.

John jumped and nervously asked "What, Sherlock?"

He elicited no response from the man, who had begun twitching slightly in his furious thought process.

"What Sherlock?" John tried again with a little more force.

"I need data." Sherlock finally demanded in a booming voice that seemed to fill the whole room with startling echoes. "What state was the body in?" he turned to the D.I. very quickly with an expression that would seem, to anyone else, a bit frenzied and manic.

"No need to shout." Lestrade said, placing his hand squarely on his hips and demonstrating his authoritative manner. "She was ripped to pieces, almost unrecognizable. First-responders think she was attacked by an animal. God-forbid if a human did that much damage to her…"

Sherlock's thin hand sliced through the air, motioning for silence. "Irrelevant." He snapped.

"Sherlock." John's voice floated up as a warning from over his shoulder and Sherlock, almost unconsciously, curbed his cruel comments.

"There's no word yet so far as an autopsy goes, but Anderson's found something rather remarkable…"

Sherlock laughed; a harsh, cold, mocking sound.

"Why do I doubt that?" he said.

"Hair attached to the victim's clothes and wounds." Lestrade said curtly, feeling the implied insult, yet knowing that Anderson deserved every jibe that Sherlock sent his way.

"Blonde? Brunette?" John asked.

"Wolf." Lestrade said affirmatively. "Or… at least dog. There's no doubt about that."

Sherlock leans back on his heels; his mind is flying one-thousand miles away at speeds excess of what he wanted to contemplate.

"So." He says at last, talking more to himself than either John or Lestrade, "Someone wants us to think she was mauled by a wolf. This sounds like the beginnings of a serial killer to me."

"Oh, stop grinning." Lestrade gestures at him in disgust and the small smile slides from Sherlock's face.

"I think we should pay Molly a visit, what do you say?" Sherlock suddenly asked John.

"Huh, oh… I don't…"

"Autopsy results are back. You were right." Sgt. Sally Donovan strode up to Lestrade, her chin pushed forward prominently, as though she were balancing something on her nose that would topple off if she did not strut through Scotland Yard proudly with a high head. "Animal attacks, most of the major organs were eaten or…"

She caught sight of Sherlock out of the corner of her eye and slowed down momentarily, almost shyly, but in the next instant she sped up and related her discovery as quickly as she could, barely pausing for breath.

"…Eaten or severely damaged, the marks on the bone were hard enough to eliminate a human agent. Forensic anthropologists are testing to see what animal could have left those marks as we speak. I told them to test wolves first, so it shouldn't be long."

She reached into the folder she was carrying and delicately removed a small bundle of photographs, holding both of them out to her boss with an unspoken dignity that seemed to demand, or rather plead, for respect.

"There was one other thing, bruising around the wrist and ankle which indicates she was bound at some point. Just in case you were wondering, yes, this is definitely our division."

Lestrade smiled sadly, his fears realized and met Sgt. Donovan's eyes with a knowing look. Sgt. Donovan mirrored that look and took it as her dismissal, turning curtly on her heels and strutting away.

"Definitely murder then…interesting." Sherlock smiled. "So now then, why a wolf…"

###

* * *

This isn't my first fanfiction on , but it's the first one I'm actually trying with. I'm basically computer illeterate, and all I can really manage is Deviantart, but I'm really trying hard to understand this time and I'll update as soon as I can. Be gentle just in case! I know I suck at fomating and stuff, but feel free to reveiw and add helpful criticism (Or instructions on how to better utilize .


	2. Chapter 2: Friends with coffee

Sherlock arched his eyebrows in a way that made John sigh. He looked, for all purposes, like he knew _exactly_ why there was a wolf theme to this murder.

"What are you thinking Sherlock?" John asked wearily, knowing that he wasn't going to receive a straight answer.

"I think that Molly could probably use a coffee break right about now." He said reclaiming his small triumphant smile and striding towards the nearest exit leaving a nearly baffled Lestrade in his wake.

"Hold up, I'm not—"

"Text me the images and whatever else you find." Sherlock said disinterestedly as John shuffled through the mob of police officers to catch up with the detective who seemed to glide over the crowds on a pocket of air.

"Lestrade!" a young Detective Inspector barked over the murmuring crowd to the graying man who jolted upright as though he'd been electrocuted.

"We need you over here, triple homicide takes precedent."

John said a silent apology to the wearied inspector, who gazed off to where Sherlock was vanishing with a forlorn hope in his tired eyes. He had said once that he was desperate when he went to Sherlock for help, and now in the gray fluorescent light filtered from the ceiling in the yard John could really see it.

In a flash it vanished and Lestrade spun around to face the young Detective "Dammit Dimmock!" He exclaimed, but the rest of his stern conversation was drowned out by the roar of the busy police station.

John caught up to Sherlock just as he burst through the exit door and into the dingy gray light on the street. The flush of crisp air invigorated John and fueled his indignation.

"That was not good Sherlock." He panted, straightening his jumper with a few remedial tugs.

"Not good?" He asked, sounding almost childish.

"No." John said trotting to keep up with his long-legged partner. "Lestrade came to you for help; you should at least hear him out. What ever happened to collecting data?"

"I have what I needed from the Yard, now what's important is what we find on the body."

"What's important is treating your friends with honest decency." John countered, slipping calmly back into his seemingly permanent role as Sherlock's personal fortune cookie. "And not just when you want something."

Sherlock snorted "Decency is indecent." He threw out his arm, bellowed for a cab and one immediately slowed to a halt beside the curb.

As he climbed into the car, with John right behind him he added a noncommittal "And honesty is dishonest."

John settled himself into the car seat, pondering the meaning behind his flat-mate's cryptic responses. It wasn't unlike him to philosophize, but 'Honesty is dishonest'? What was that supposed to mean? Sherlock was Mister Honest, even when the situation called for a gentle white lie. One could always count on Sherlock to be honest to a fault, painfully honest. He would never lie to a person's face when the truth would hurt them more. Unless he had a good reason, like for a case or something.

After a few seconds of agonizing deliberation John decided he was not fit to probe Sherlock's twisted, complicated mind and he opted to take the straight-and-narrow path to the answer. The only route that Sherlock himself would never take.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked.

Sherlock turned to him, surprised etched around his cold blue eyes.

"You didn't really mean anything did you?" John asks.

Sherlock shrugs and turns to look out the window as the car speeds away from New Scotland Yard with a calming hum.

"You never say anything just for the hell of it, so what did you mean?" John pressed.

Sherlock gave John a careless little shrug, and expected John to be satisfied with that as an answer.

#

The ride to St. Bart's was silent and contemplative. John was half-stuck in a haze between mulling over his flat mate's curious change in behavior and running through the video of the wolf-man again.

In the time John had spent with Sherlock he no longer had the need to ask obvious questions, such as the clichéd "Who could do such a thing?" The world could be a sick place and it was definitely filled with sick people; but he still had to wonder what on earth the man had been thinking when he decided he was going to play a werewolf in front of Scotland Yard delivering a body.

"Wasn't it bad enough killing the poor girl?" he thought counting the candy-colored bicyclists that were pedaling en masse in the opposite direction across the street from where the cab was halted at a particularly stubborn red light. "What on earth is there left to gain by making a spectacle of her?"

John pushed thoughts like that out of his head. The criminals he met almost daily were a twisted and unique breed that followed a code all their own. It didn't matter what seemed to make sense to the rest of the world; "Normal blokes like me" John reminded himself; all that seemed to matter to them was fulfilling their own macabre desires and upholding their own perverse codes.

"Clearly." Sherlock murmured under his breath.

"Sorry?" John turned, thinking that he was finally being acknowledged.

"Obviously." Sherlock's eyes were scanning the London streets with their usual cold blue intensity, but from his expression John could guess that his true thoughts were probably miles and miles away. Perhaps with the girl wrapped in the sheet they were on their way to see.

"Oh, still talking to yourself I see. Well, don't mind me then."

"John would you please stop making noise, it's distracting." Sherlock snapped.

John stared at him incredulously. He had known the man for quite some time, and yet Sherlock never ceased to surprise him with his sheer callousness towards others.

"Right." John thought turning straight in his seat. "Nothing's changed then."

#

He smiled as St. Bart's loomed over the buildings just ahead of their taxi, gray and unassuming just like most of the nearby buildings. But, also like most of the buildings in London, St. Bartholomew's hospital had a few remarkable traits and a fascinating secret history that most of the alumni graduating this year were still completely unaware of.

It was by far the oldest hospital in London, built in 1123, and renovated just three years earlier right before the fall incident. It was also John's alma mater and still held a myriad of cherished memories; bar the one horrible memory.

The cab pulled up to the curb and Sherlock remained frozen where he sat as John prepared to exit the vehicle.

"Hey, are you alright back there?" The cabbie craned his neck around and stared at the petrified detective, who couldn't seem to peel his eyes away from the pavement for a moment.

"He's fine." John assured him pulling a few bills from his wallet and paying the man in cash. When the transaction was complete and the cabbie went back to his thoughts gripping the wheel with both firm hands John reached out and nudged Sherlock in the shoulder.

"Come on, we're here." He said as the detective blinked a few times confusedly.

"You were so excited to get here a few minutes ago, what happened to all of your energy?"

Sherlock batted away another tender nudge and with a brisk sweep of his hand and in that one fluid motion he dispelled any hope of John's questions receiving an answer.

"Alright, fine; don't answer me, but at least get out of the nice man's cab?"

Sherlock crawled out of the cab sulking slightly. He knew he had to get out of the cab, but he still resented being talked down to, like a _child_.

#

"Is Molly working today?" John asked as they stood outside the looming hospital listening to the cab veer away from the street and disappear into the hum of all the other cars.

"Yes." Sherlock said cutting across the street and into the, thankfully, halted traffic.

John felt his jaw drop, completely involuntarily, and he chased after his reckless friend, arms outstretched ready to grab the collar of his black belstaff coat and wrench him back to the safety of the sidewalk.

"What are you doing?" He exclaimed checking both ways for any speeding cars careening forward ready to smash into them with an almighty shriek of metal and glass. When he was confident that none were apparent he trotted beside his friend, urging him across the street quickly.

"It is normal social procedure to offer something before asking for something, therefore I was thinking of getting Molly a cup of coffee in exchange for her help." He said innocently pointing at the trendy, albeit empty, coffee shop across the street from the hospital.

John felt his heart slowly return to its normal beating pace and asked, in the least exasperated tone manageable: "Didn't your parents ever teach you to _look both ways before crossing the street_?"

"Oh, is that what they were going on about? I must have deleted it." Sherlock stated in a bland, uninterested tone.

"Can you do my heart a favor from now on? Don't delete the life-saving things, okay?" John said glancing up and down the street, still nervously waiting for his palpitations to end.

#

They both decided on a tall caramel coffee for Molly and they each got themselves a small cup as well. John forced Sherlock to wait for traffic to stop before they crossed the street and entered the hospital.

The first thing most people will usually notice about a hospital is the antiseptic smell which permanently lingers in the air and on the doctors as well, even once they've left the hospital. The second thing someone might notice about a hospital might be the cheesy décor, which looks faded and washed out under the fluorescent lights, or the cheap art work on the wall, or if you happen to be particularly lucky a pretty nurse at the front desk.

The first thing John and Sherlock noticed upon walking into St. Bart's was the horrific screaming of a woman in terrible pain and the glistening ruby blood that left a splattered trail on the polished linoleum.

A young blonde woman had somehow limped into the hospital and now clutched at the front desk emitting ear-splitting, blood curdling, horrified screams for help. He foot had been completely severed from her leg and was nowhere to be seen, and a gaggle of doctors in flapping white coats hovered over the woman, alternately gasping and grimacing at the bloody stump while the woman insisted in a shrill bird-call that she was "Bleeding To Death."

"God, someone help me, please someone! I'm Bleeding To Death!"

One brave nurse pried the woman's arms from the front desk and held her hand, letting her lean against her stout figure and chanting soothing words into her left ear while another nurse waved her red-taloned fingernails over the woman and shouted questions into her right ear.

"It's going to be okay. The best doctors are here to help you. You're going to be just fine…"

"Can you tell me your name? Where are your parents? What is your name?"

"Help me please, I'm Bleeding To Death!"

"What is your name?"

"I'm Bleeding To Death!"

Sherlock steered John away from the bustle of the small drama and down an empty narrow hallway which led to a secluded room far, far, far away from the living patients; the lonely and cold Morgue where Molly Hooper spent her cheerful days.

John walked beside Sherlock in silence, listening to the echo of the woman's pained shrieks fade away. Even when he no longer heard her pleas for help, he imagined the tortured screams and a shudder ripped down his spine like a snaking bead of cold water.

"I wonder what happened to her." He asked looking down upon Molly's cup of coffee which he clutched too tightly with his steady hand.

"Huh? Who?" Sherlock said turning halfway to John.

"The woman. Without a foot?" John gestured behind them, wondering secretly if Sherlock had really forgotten (Or deleted) the episode already.

"Oh," He said carelessly. "My guess would be a family member with one of those small electric saws."

He seemed to fluctuate a bit, his head rocking slightly, as though he were shaking up his thoughts with a gentle rocking; stirring the sediment in his mind until it rose to the surface.

"Statistically more likely to be a father, though if I was forced to guess I'd probably say step-father."

John stopped in the hallway, blinking in utter amazement.

"How on earth…" He asked trying to grasp at what clues might have led his slightly amazing flat mate to his seemingly miraculous conclusion.

"Okay, I follow you up to band-saw, but how on earth could you –_possibly_- know it was her stepfather?"

"Come now John, a magician never reveals his tricks." Sherlock said with a sly smile.

John shot him a confused glance. "Deduction is not magic, and you always reveal your tricks. It's your –thing-."

Sherlock's sly smile became a Cheshire cat grin as they approached the doors to the morgue, but he remained silent.

John couldn't tell what new phase of his mood this was, but he was cautious anyway.

#

"Good morning Molly." Sherlock stated snappily at the brunette who was bent over the prostrate body of an older man. His sudden arrival caused Molly to jolt with a frightened squeak and knock her clip-board to the floor with a deafening clatter.

"Oh! Oh my, Sherlock? Wh-what are you doing here, I mean I can guess what you're doing here, you probably want to see a body or use the lab, but I meant to say, or I guess what I said…"

"John brought you some coffee." Sherlock said pointing to the Styrofoam cup in John's hands. John dumbly extended his arm and offered the steaming beverage to a very grateful mortician.

"Thank you John." She gushed immediately sipping the foamy-sweet drink with little-suppressed relish.

"Now, Molly, we do need to see a body." Sherlock said rubbing his hands together greedily.

"You know I'd be happy to show you any body. Well, not just anybody, what I meant was any corpse… but I guess you know that…" She equivocated nervously.

"Thank you Molly." John said at once, sensing that Sherlock wasn't going to.

"I'll… I'll just need a bit of help getting Mr. Rogers here back into the freezer. Would you two mind donning some gloves and lending me a hand. Or, I mean… helping me lift him off the table. I know it's weird when someone who works in a morgue asks for a hand, not that your hands aren't lovely; I mean, for men, which isn't to say…"

"Sure, we'll help; won't we Sherlock?"

Sherlock grunted in reply, but went to fetch latex gloves anyway.

Mr. Rogers was covered in thick gray hair from the tip of his thin, ovular head to the patches of silver on each of his toes. One yellow snaggle-tooth jutted from the bottom of his lip and pushed his lips apart in a post-humus snarl. But most importantly he was a heavy set gentleman, just shy of six feet tall and easily two-hundred and sixty pounds. Much bigger than what John thought the young mortician could carry by herself.

Molly directed each man to one of the feet and instructed them to seize the ankles in a firm, but not bruising, grip. She readied a stretcher beside the table and dug her slender hands into the rolls of flesh that were splayed over top the gleaming silver table.

"On my mark." She warned them, spreading her legs apart and preparing for the lift.

"Three…two…**LIFT**!"

John heaved the man with all his strength and gasped in surprise at how heavy his dead-weight was.

In a flash the three of them had slung Mr. Rogers to the stretcher, which groaned under the surprise of his bulky frame and Molly finished loading him, gently, into the freezer.

"You're remarkably strong for a woman of your stature." Sherlock commented removing the gloves with an audible snap.

"Oh, well… I work alone most days, so I guess I've just gotten used to moving bodies around. It was nice to have help for a change."

"Scotland Yard probably dropped this body off early this morning; it should be mostly destroyed by, apparently, some form of animal attack."

"I'm sorry?" Molly asked.

"The body, we need to see the body now." Sherlock said slowly, a tinge of frustration in his words.

"Oh, yes… of course." Molly said retrieving her clipboard from the floor. "Um, let me just see… oh, the Jane Doe who was eaten?"

"The same." John nodded.

"I have most of her here in freezer number twenty-three, but there isn't much left. The thing she was wrapped in was taken by a forensics team from the Yard."

Sherlock groaned.

"Let me just, pull her out for you." Molly said unlocking one low-lying door and rolling out a slab.

John had seen plenty of bodies; as a doctor, in the army, with Sherlock. But every once in a while there was a body that would leave him sick to his stomach and wishing that the thing in the ally, or in the house, or in this case on the slab wasn't human to begin with. The mangled body parts on the cold metal table could easily have been many things before human, they were almost unrecognizable.

Except for one, mostly whole, arm and leg.

Sherlock had fetched himself a new pair of white gloves and he pulled them on excitedly, bending over the body hungrily. In his great dark coat he seemed like some gaunt wraith, or specter performing some grisly final passage with utter delight.

He hovered over the remains of the open torso, nose almost pressing against one tattered breast and his dark curls nearly brushing against the cold marble skin. He slid his gaze down across her navel, and, not finding anything, onto her thigh. The thigh had, for the most part, been wrenched off and the only thing suggesting it having been there in the first place was a red stump.

"Sherlock." John felt ill. He was a doctor, and had already performed a cursory analysis over his friend's shoulder. "Aren't those _bite_ marks."

The white skin was pocked with bright pink cuts in a perfectly parabola across the cheek of her butt and some of the stomach which remained.

"I believe they are." Sherlock said continuing his weary path down the ruined body with a stone-face and bright, darting eyes.

"Then she was certainly eaten by a wolf?" John had to ask, though he knew the answer too well.

"It would appear that way, though I wouldn't rule out domestic dogs yet." He said prodding the open flesh with one bleach-white finger and pulling it away sticky with congealed blood.

"I would." Molly chimed confidently.

John spun around to look clearly at her and Sherlock glanced up at her over his shoulder and all of the confidence she had put into that one statement crumbled away. She stared shyly at the ground and murmured an excuse for herself.

"I found a few molds in the school, for teaching… I mean, for teaching about the bodies. They were… They were dogs teeth, um, molds for dogs teeth. Or, that's to say their jaws. Anyway I chose a few likely candidates and I borrowed them from the classroom… before you ask, there were quite a few, actually there were a whole lot, so I thought I had covered my bases pretty well, that is to say…"

"Spit it out!" Sherlock exclaimed.

Molly stood erect with fear, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth curled in terror, but the words flew from her lips freely.

"I matched the bite radius with a dozen or so of the largest domestic dogs Bart's had samples of, none of them were as wide or large. A huge dog made those bites, or a wolf."

She gasped and opened her eyes, surprised at her outburst and at how smoothly she had composed a sentence. She waited for the awkwardness, or for something to seem wrong or off, but nothing was. She had merely stated her mind. It was strangely freeing.

Sherlock steepled his fingers beneath his chin and rested his head on the peak. His blue eyes looked gray under the fluorescent lights and his eyebrows were knitted together in deep concentration.

Just then his phone rang; once, twice, three times. He paid the thing no mind at first, but finally he was so fed up with the noise he scooped the phone out of his pocket and slammed his finger against the button, angrily answering with a sharp growl of indignation.

"Hello?" he barked.

"Yes?" he said with genuine curiosity. The voice on the other end of the line chattered.

"Sure?" He sounded almost concerned. The voice spoke a little more fiercely.

"Not much." He said leaning against the metal slab. "Just that she was a prostitute who worked part-time at the Tesco's in Westminster, cared for her elderly grandmother with Alzheimer's, was approximately four-foot-ten-inches before she was eaten and that she was carrying something heavy right before she was killed."

John felt his eyes bulge and his jaw drop, again, involuntarily.

"Uh-huh. Keep me informed." Sherlock nodded and ended the call.

He turned and met John's incredulous gaze and shrugged in a way that said "you-know-what-I'm-like".

"Um, a prostitute? I don't see how…" The shrug was lost on Molly who struggled to connect the strings of his deduction.

"Sherlock, how do you know she's a… um, well. How did you deduce…?"

"Easy. I knew her."

"You _knew_ her?" Molly wrestled with her emotions and attempted to suppress the urge to wail, smoothing all of the wrinkled creases and frown lines that rippled across her face into a cool mask of indifference.

"Via the homeless network. She hung around quite a bit." He said pulling out his phone and typing something into the search browser.

"She has a name?" John asked.

"Anne Rutledge."

John looked down to the woman's sole remaining hand; two fingers vanished giving the rest of the slender hand a lop-sided appearance. The three remaining fingers were turned up to the ceiling and John finally noticed the black ink Sherlock must have seen immediately. Tar-black ink in neat little ovals marring the fingertips where forensics had pressed them into the infamous black inkpad in an attempt to salvage some sense of her identity. Her face and most of her body had disappeared, obscuring her forever, except for her fingerprints.

It was endlessly sad to him whenever a person was reduced to just their belongings and their fingerprints. Now at least she also had her name.

"Thank you Molly." Sherlock said pulling off his gloves and pocketing his phone.

"Come on John." He beckoned his friend with an encouraging nod, heading straight for the exit.

"Wait! You have to wash your hands before you go out." Molly told them, chasing Sherlock briefly, yet stopping just short of the door as though she were tethered to her operating table.

"Don't worry; I have some hand sanitizer in my pocket." Sherlock said.

"That's not…" Molly started but when she noted the pleading tone in her voice her words died away.

John gave her an apologetic smile, as he often had to after Sherlock had finished doing damage, and followed the tall detective on his heels leaving Molly, again, quite alone.

She hated having company in the morgue; for when they leave, as all people ultimately do when visiting the morgue, the silence of the dead is all but crushing afterwards.

###

* * *

Sherlock's bouncing around is really wearing me out! But on the brightside I've figured out a (twisted, convoluted, crazy) way to add chapters! I don't feel like such a total n00b anymore! Fun with Anderson next!


	3. Chapter 3: Fun with Anderson

"Sherlock, hold up for a second."

"What John?" Sherlock asked slowing his strides only the slightest bit to accommodate his shorter roommate.

"We need to talk." John said.

"We need to breathe air. I need to immerse myself in cases. Everything else seems superfluous." He said detachedly.

John stared at the back of Sherlock's head, stunned and momentarily unable to imagine the stony face that spewed those words.

"Okay." He said picking up his pace and attempting to walk at his flat mate's side. "This is exactly what we need to talk about. You're acting…" John scanned his brain for the right term "…_funny_."

"I thought you told me I wasn't funny." Sherlock said, speaking straight ahead to the hospital door, never gracing John with a glance over his shoulder.

"You're not. Would you hold on!" John exclaimed angrily as he altered between a light jogging and a fast walking pace.

Sherlock halted dead in the hallway and John crashed into his back, forcing him to stumble.

"Ow…" John said regaining his balance and scurrying away from the detective "What the hell?"

"The hell, John…" Sherlock said, anger causing his voice to tremble slightly "Is that Anne Rutledge was in the middle of helping me with a case when she disappeared. Now we get a package from a dead man, and she turns up dead with cocaine beneath her nails…"

"What?" upon the word 'cocaine' John immediately felt a surge of panic; misplaced fear of Sherlock experiencing a relapse.

Sherlock lifted his hand up into the shorter man's face and contorted it into a claw. "Cocaine. Beneath her nails. There are signs of where forensics had scraped under her nails, but some remained."

John thought back to the body, how numb and shocked he had been staring at the remains of a face, the tattered flesh that had once been a neck, the incomplete limbs that suddenly plunged into stumps and how fixated on the bite patterns he had been. Of course Sherlock lifting and observing the single-remaining hand would have gone unnoticed.

Now he pushed his mind back and forced himself to remember, Sherlock had picked up the arm and turned it over in his hands like a precious spy-glass. He then placed it gingerly on the table beside it's owner.

"But what did he do after that?" John fought the fog which had hijacked his mind.

He had taken the limp wrist, and held it in his spidery fingers, scrutinizing the hand with small, circular rotations of his neck, much in the same way a bird might observe a piece of bread.

Her hand, her hand; two fingers and a thumb. It seemed incredible that every finger was not scraped for evidence, for there were so few.

"Hang on, what case?" John asked pulling himself back to the room, back to his friend who stared him down with a gnarled claw and blazing cold eyes.

"Not important." He barked. "What is important is the blanket."

"The blanket?"

"Yes, the blanket. The blanket she came in. The one with trace evidence of the killer? Perhaps then we can find out what actually killed her." Sherlock turned on his heels and started down the hallway, leaving John overwhelmed where he stood.

"You mean the wolf didn't kill her?" He asked, slowly realizing he needed to walk with Sherlock to keep the conversation going.

"Oh no," Sherlock said smiling. "The wolf killed the evidence, and I'll bet the evidence killed the wolf."

John sighed deeply. He was so curious he was practically palpitating with questions, but Sherlock wasn't giving him anything but vague answers. He was wondering if it was worth it to ask his flat mate to clarify.

On the way out the front door John noticed that the trail of blood had been expertly mopped up, leaving no evidence of the screaming woman's painful life-or-death struggle.

He nudged Sherlock lightly. "Should we tell the hospital about the father? Or Step-father?"

Sherlock glared at John irritably, having been pushed out of his mind palace by what he saw as a trifle.

"Why bother?" he asked, preparing himself for the doctor's reaction "He's already dead."

"How on earth could you _possibly_ know that?" John asked as a gust of cold wind tore at his face from the gaping glass door that he stepped through following Sherlock into the street."

"Elementary." Sherlock said walking on the side walk until he found a good place to hail a cab. "Blood spatters on her clothes; even you should have noted there was too much blood on her face and hands. If she had just been trying to staunch her bleeding foot her hands would be coated in blood, but that wouldn't quite explain he blood on her face and clothes."

Sherlock threw his arm into the air and startled John by bellowing for a cab suddenly, breaking his own thoughts. But one deep breath later he continued as a cab pulled up on the curb.

"Now, when someone is shot, blood sprays outward in a fine mist. The girl's hands were dyed with blood from where she had been trying to stop the bleeding, but her face and clothes were almost pink with a _drizzle of blood_! Clearly she killed her uncle in self-defense."

John crawled into the car nodding. Everything Sherlock had said made sense, and he had seen in first hand.

"Wait a moment… _Uncle_?"

"Yes, uncle." Sherlock said almost unaffectedly.

"You said _step-father_ earlier." John reminded him.

"Did I?" Sherlock said innocently.

"Yes!"

"No I didn't. It was always the uncle. Anyone could have seen that." Sherlock sniffed.

The argument lasted until the cab came to a stop and Sherlock hurriedly leapt out of the vehicle, leaving John to pay the cabbie.

#

The forensics division of Scotland Yard is not the most notable building that makes up the yard, nor is it in any way similar to how a forensics lab is portrayed on television. It is in many ways similar to the interior of a doctor's office and not dissimilar to the hospital, with the same boring art on the walls and the same overpowering scent of antiseptic lingering in the air.

The actual lab was where the building suddenly stopped pretending to be ordinary and adopted the white-walls-lined-with-shelves-of-chemicals façade of business.

Bright fluorescent bulbs dyed the people and equipment a pale blue beneath the sterilizing light and often scientists and doctors would step out into the city for their lunch break and find they withered beneath the coy London sun.

Mark Anderson was one of those technician/ vampires who haunted the forensic labs, stalking out into the streets of London maybe once or twice a day to gather up evidence of crimes, then racing back to the lab to dissect and analyze whatever specimens they had acquired.

At the moment he was sloshing a fiber around in a narrow glass test tube and squinting to make out the chemical reaction. The fluorescent bulb above his head had just started flickering catatonically, trapped in a fitful seizure and causing a strobe-light affect that made it impossible for Anderson to work, or even concentrate. He felt as though he were functioning one step behind the rest of the world.

He stalked across the lab to a brightly lit corner where the defective bulb would not be a problem and continued to analyze the fiber.

#

John and Sherlock walked silently into the lab and found Anderson turned away from the door, focusing on the fiber and apparently oblivious to their entry.

Sherlock opened his mouth, ready to lob a destructive comment at the back of Anderson's head, but John grabbed him and motioned for silence, a mischievous grin tugging at the corners of his lips.

John took a few purposefully loud steps and cleared his throat notably.

"Nothing yet Lestrade, I told you you'd be the first person I'd call if I found anything." Anderson said without looking up.

Sherlock caught onto the joke immediately and had to fight hard against the laughter which bubbled up in his throat.

John sighed, again sounding suspiciously like Lestrade. Anderson put his test-tube down and moved over to a microscope nearby.

"Look, I told you: forensics take time. It's only been a few hours since we got the body, be happy that we have an ID. When I'm done with the fiber analysis I'll try to lift latent prints off the blanket, but until then I can't help you."

John cocked his eyebrow like Lestrade and Anderson seemed to hear it, for he rose from his microscope and waved over to the table on the other end of the room where the red woolen blanket had been neatly rolled out and smoothed.

"Emily is on the hunt for the manufacturer right now; the samples of dog fur are over there, go take a look if you want."

Sherlock crept on the toes of his shoes silently over to where the evidence lifted from the blanket was stacked in neat, labeled piles.

"The bugs that were lifted off the body place the time of death at around twelve hours before the bomb so…" Anderson paused to think the simple math through in his head "About two o clock in the afternoon?"

Sherlock rolled his eyes and bit his tongue. He had almost said "Wow, third grade math. Excellent progress Anderson." But he forced himself into silence. Anderson wouldn't say anything if he knew who he was talking to.

"At least the mass spec. seems to be working right." Anderson said bowing into his microscope "That substance we collected from the nails? Turns out you were right, it was cocaine."

John's face revealed his surprise. "So Lestrade knew too? Why didn't he tell us?" he asked himself silently watching Anderson work from behind and monitoring Sherlock from the corner of his eye.

"Don't tell the freak." Anderson added smugly.

John growled in irritation, sounding very much like himself. It took the last iota of concentration not to slam his fist into the back of Anderson's greasy head and sent his forehead ricocheting into his precious microscope.

Anderson's cell phone rang and he bent down to check it. He chuckled and held it up over his shoulder and John came to grab it from him.

"Wolf's fur. Score two for you. She said it's undoubtedly from the North American Gray Wolf. No question."

John read the text message to himself and beckoned Sherlock over to read it. Sherlock snuck up behind Anderson and scanned his phone, ignoring the message.

"I'm almost done here. But do you want my opinion?"

"Oh I would _love _your opinion." John thought sarcastically as Sherlock made gagging motions.

Anderson took the silence as permission and spoke his mind anyway. "I think she might have just been a prostitute looking for some extra on the side and she got herself buried in one of those weirder gangs out there. The Drug lords with the weird pets? Like Anthony Council a few weeks back with the kimono dragons? I can imagine holding a few wolves in a building in London."

"I can't" Sherlock said.

Anderson jumped and spun around in shock as the glass tube he was holding slipped out of his fingers and started to plummet to the floor. Sherlock's white hand snaked around Anderson's arm and nimbly grabbed the smooth cylinder, halting it's descent in mid-air.

"Wha-you-how!?" Anderson sputtered and Sherlock put the test tube back on the table and relished the reaction he was getting from his least favorite member of Lestrade's team. He made a mental note to thank John later; which he also promptly deleted.

"Fingerprints would be so much more important than analysis of the blanket; I can buy that particular blanket at any discount home-décor store. You should get your priorities in order."

Anderson's narrow eyes appeared beady as he squinted at the detective, swiveling back and forth from his microscope to the man. His face seemed thinner and leaner; making his nose, of course, seem bigger and longer.

"When vexed," John noted through his amused eyes "Anderson's rat-like features become enhanced."

He gaped a bit, at a loss for words then he quickly regained his false sense of bravado and began making up for his embarrassment.

"You are not allowed in here! Get out! What were you thinking, pretending to be Lestrade?" He said puffing up his chest and straightening his slouch as he shouted.

"I was thinking I was beginning to miss your lovely face." Sherlock said sardonically. John felt a chill at his side.

"Aw, isn't that sweet." Anderson said sourly, scrunching his nose and beginning to sneer.

"Hair on the blanket?" Sherlock began to shoot of a series of questions in a rapid-fire.

"Matches the victim." Anderson fired back.

"Bodily fluids?"

"Only the victim's"

"Maggots?"

"Twelve hour eggs."

"Soil samples?" Sherlock snapped.

"What?" Anderson said dumbly.

"Soil, dirt, she was rolled in the blanket so the blanket must have picked up some of the dirt around where she was killed." Sherlock explained quickly and furiously.

"I know that." Anderson replied petulantly. "I haven't finished collecting samples yet."

"And yet you have enough time to analyze the fibers of the blanket?" Sherlock said, trying to keep the satisfaction he felt at besting a bully out of his tone.

"It's none of your business how I do my job, freak." Anderson snarled.

"But it is mine." Lestrade said coming into the room fully from where he had been waiting leaning against the door jamb. "Anderson, start collecting soil. Now."

Anderson glared at Sherlock, but turned and faced the blanket without another word. Lestrade motioned for Sherlock and John to follow him out of the lab.

#

"I don't know why you antagonize him Sherlock." Lestrade said strolling down the hallway and glancing once or twice at a piece of cheap art on the walls.

"I don't antagonize. He doesn't do his job well. I'm merely _helping _him." Sherlock said glancing at John, who knew the full story. John looked away innocently.

"Right. Uh-huh." Lestrade said. "Look, back to business: We found this Rutledge girl's apartment where she lived with her grand mum. I'm heading over there to break the news to her."

"I didn't know that was your job?" John said.

"It's not, but I don't want a bunch of police officers tearing through the woman's home trying to uncover evidence of her granddaughter's killer either."

Lestrade faltered a little bit, holding his mouth ajar a bit, and then closing it resolutely. He clamped his teeth together, and then took a deep breath through them before deciding to speak again.

"My Nanna had dementia. It wasn't pretty. I would really like to avoid the usual 'Scotland Yard' parade if at all possible." Lestrade sucked in his cheeks and momentarily craved a cigarette worse than anything.

"Lord knows it could ruin this woman." He said finally.

"That's where we come in?" Sherlock asked, noting the signs of cigarette withdrawal on his face and all the warning signs of the cravings.

Lestrade nodded. "If there's evidence, Sherlock, you'll find it. Quickly and quietly I hope. Plus I'm almost certain you'll know what to do with it better than the guys we normally send in."

"True, true." Sherlock said nodding.

"Where are we heading then?" John asked practically.

"Brixton. I've got a squad car parked out front."

Sherlock made a face.

"Give us the address and we'll take a cab." He said "We're not coming in a squad car."

Lestrade smiled "Oh, come on. I'll let you play with the sirens."

If looks could kill, Scotland Yard would have been down one Detective Inspector.

###

* * *

I worked hard on this chapter, but somehow I still don't feel satisfied. My brain funk is interfeering with all aspects of my life on a grandiose scale


	4. Chapter 4: The Rutledge House

**Am I satisfied with this chapter? No, not really. My grandmother has demintia, and I tried to write Grandma Rutledge as seriously as I could, but she still turned out to be somewhat comic. I hate all of these little mood inconsistancies. **

* * *

In the cab, Sherlock sat, again, in silence, as he was wont to do from time to time, and especially during a case where all of his single-minded focus was directed at the evidence and the victim in question. If he had his way nothing would ever enter his purview at these times, leaving him in utter exhilarating contemplation until he inevitably had wrung all of the answers, and therefore interest, from a problem. He would have loved to beat the issue around the creases of his mind with all of his gusto and strength until it held no more mysteries; until he had covered it so completely he knew it intimately, and he could dismiss the useless case; cast it from his mind, without a second thought. That was the perfect case, one that would offer substance to his musing and would take time and solitude to unravel.

John would never understand the necessity for solitude and abstractness that Sherlock's mind required for solving a case. He was under the impression that it was something Sherlock did very naturally and that required very little effort at all, like how a snake slides on its belly with ease.

This, of course, was mostly false. Yes, Sherlock did solve cases very naturally; but no, it was still rather hard to maintain a high level of focus sweeping over hundreds of details and piecing together seemingly abstract objects in definitive patterns. Distractions were his bane, his greatest annoyance, and his one true loathing.

So he would never understand why John insisted on conversation in the cab.

"So, uh… That thing you said…in the hospital."

Sherlock grunted.

"Um, 'package from a dead man' right?" John looked up at the detective, slouched forward, tugging against his seatbelt with his elbows digging into his bony knees and felt the insatiable urge to make sure they were alone. He checked out the window and around the cab, unconscious to his own efforts at secrecy.

When he was satisfied that the cab driver was the only man in earshot he muttered "So, ah…What did you mean by that?"

Sherlock didn't respond.

At all.

Not even a breath was wasted on a sigh, nor a flicker in his eyes.

His mind was an engine, racing onwards before him, consuming all of his attention and emitting nothing but a highly polished, finished deduction. It was the most efficient, remarkable machine ever invented.

John leaned forward to meet Sherlock's eyes, which sat dull and listlessly pressed back into their dark sockets like two gray gems pressed into clay. The weight of John's revelation sat heavily on his back, making it impossible for him to breathe.

"Sherlock, I'm not you. I can't read the signs like you. I can't solve cases like you. But give me some credit: I can tell when something is wrong."

The anxious tone in John's voice managed to pull Sherlock partially out of his deep thought, so that he found himself hanging on to every word in a semi-conscious haze. His mind still turned ceaselessly at the gears of The Problem, checking and placing and fixing and churning pistons, cogs, and wheels that brought light and energy to his Mind Palace; but now his attention was divided and the progress started to slow.

"And I know it seems impossible, but with you I'm never quite sure what impossible is anymore."

The steam started to cool and the whistling of the broilers shrank into a whimper.

"I trust you, and I hope you trust me too; but you've kept me in the dark on something like this before."

With an ear-splitting screech the great metal arms came slowly to a halt, screaming one final death scream and resting their heavy steel muscles with an enormous sigh of smoke, steam, and exhaustion.

"I want you to tell me right now, no deceit, nothing; is this Moriarty's doing?"

Sherlock snapped back to life with sudden violence.

"What, no! Don't be stupid! Dead men don't plot crimes, John! It can't be him! Isn't it obvious?"

John threw up his palms in a gesture of surrender. "Okay, okay, I just wanted to be sure. " He exhaled a breath he didn't know he'd been holding in secret relief. "If he has somehow cheated death, I know that you'd see it first."

Sherlock flopped into the back of the car-seat with a disgruntled "Humph!" and crossed his arms furiously. He had lost his train of thought and would have to re-track it through the twists and curves of his Mind Palace in order to find his way back, only then could he start making progress again.

John could see the disgust etched in the subtle patterns of Sherlock's face. Disgust for being torn away from his thoughts, disgust at Moriarty; but most of all disgust at John, for even _humoring_ the faintest notion that Moriarty could have conceivably faked his death as well as Sherlock.

How dare he?

"If anyone could, besides you… It would be him, wouldn't it?" John stared blankly at the car seat in front of him.

"Yes." Sherlock accepted quietly, nodding slightly.

John glanced at Sherlock again, watching him begin to sink into his thoughts and out of reality. He wasn't quite done talking to him yet, but he was torn between the need for a companion to talk with to help chase away the chilly shadow that had been hanging over his mind since the unwrapping of the book, and the burning desire to catch the killer whose trail they were hunting with dog-like determination.

"But it's not, John." Sherlock said with finality that John took to mean _"So-leave-me-and-my-thoughts-alone."_

#

Mrs. Rutledge was nearly inconsolable after learning of her granddaughter's death. She broke into uncontrollable heaving sobs and pressed a dingy gray handkerchief to her stately bosom with passion, beating on her breast with tight fists and wailing long verses of regret, strung together with the occasional abstract "Mercy, mercy!"

"Oh, Mercy, mercy! My poor baby! My poor little girl!" She suddenly reached out and clutched the front of John's cream colored jumper with her free hand, digging her bright crimson nails into the soft braids of wool.

"It can't be my Annie!" she declared pulling John down into her face to look into her puffy, blood shot eyes.

Lestrade, wearing a stone-faced mask which neatly covered his inner turmoil tenderly took the woman's arm in a comforting embrace and pulled her into her own flat, searching for a place to seat her where she could calm herself and properly deal with the shock.

The woman seemed to be in a partial swoon, for she leaned heavily on Lestrade and only stumbled with gentle urgings from John, who; though he sympathized deeply with the woman's unimaginable pain, only wanted to free his jumper at the moment and help Sherlock.

Sherlock had not wasted time expressing sympathy, but rather he used the woman's episode to easily slip into her flat and sneak away to the rooms in the back of the house, where evidence is more likely to be hidden. He would leave the sentimental business to those who knew it better; namely, not him.

Sherlock hid in the darkly lit peach hallway and scrutinized each faded photograph on the wall, comparing faces to those of potential criminals that he might have already investigated and could give him a lead.

He at least expected to find a relic of old lovers, or an estranged father, but what he did not expect was for the wall to be lined with women, and all of them smiling.

The elder Rutledge, who then sat crying in the living room of the small, tacky flat in central London was once young; and according to the first photograph she was thin and tan with a baby girl on her hip and a cold drink in her other hand, all brightly lit with a dazzling white flash from the camera in stark contrast to the dank and dingy shadows of the bar behind her. Her own white smile was as shiny as a pearl and her baby tried to reflect that same luminous essence in its own pink little mouth. Both of their black eyes twinkled mischievously, as if sharing the same unheard joke. The date, written in black ink on the bottom of the photograph stated that it had been 1968.

"They all had children so young." Sherlock thought before pushing the thought out of his head completely and perusing the row of pictures with his eagle eyes.

The baby from the previous photo had grown and in the second image she held a babe of her own to her heart, clad in a white hospital gown which clung loosely to her frame like robes of paper and beaming brightly cradling the infant in strong dark arms. For the faintest moment, Sherlock could not tell the difference between the eldest Rutledge and her daughter, but only for a moment. The eyebrows and nose were both clearly inherited from the father. The babe itself in the photograph was nearly indiscernible, for the blanket hooded its face and it turned towards its mother's breast and away from the sharp, piercing light of the camera. The date: 1984.

The rest of the photos were of Anne Rutledge, and Sherlock found it almost too haunting to be faced with dozens of images of the dead girl staring at him from every angle. The elementary school photo glared at him, daring him to tell each happy, eager, innocent-faced child exactly where their adult self had ended up. The middle school choir girl lifted her face to a sparkling stage light, her mouth a perfect little oval frozen in an infinite golden note from some long-forgotten beautiful song.

The sentimentality was a bitter after-thought which lingered after every photo. The three women standing on the beach, one little dark-haired child holding an ice cream cone, the almond-eyed teenager thrusting a pom-pom into the sky, chest proudly bearing the insignia of the feline mascot, mouth ajar in an endless chat. It was all so…human! It was a lifetime, a whole life time mounted on the peach memorial and framed in thin strips of oak. Everywhere he looked youth and mirth showered over him, sickly sweet like someone's sappy biography. It couldn't have been any more reminiscent if he had taken a photo album and thumbed the pages with the older Rutledge's narration. It was all so…distracting! He was scrutinizing pictures of innocence and childhood when he should have been focusing on finding the person who had turned this child into a sack of ground meat.

Sherlock quickly brushed his hand over his face in a great sweeping gesture, trying to wipe away his thoughts and pull up the image of the body, the image of the forensics lab's evidence, the image of the blanket being tossed onto the doorway, the image of the wolf-man running on his hands and knees. Those were the only photos that mattered. They would help him deliver some closure to the smiling, brown-eyed child that stood eagerly in each picture; waiting for his answer. He almost didn't recognize the spritely little girl that danced from one frame to the next, grinning mischievously with her dark, glittering eyes. She seemed totally different from the cynical, rough speaking woman smoking a joint that had told him, in as many words, to run into traffic.

Then at the end of the hallway, the kaleidoscope of memories suddenly was halted, cut short, chopped off. The last photo in the hallway before the pair of bedroom doors was of a woman, nearly unrecognizable, with short brown hair that stopped neatly beneath her ears and dark brown eyes, staring up into some kind of light, almost reverently. Her face was wane and pale, her clothes were cheap and black. This was the Anne he had known.

He checked the date: 2008. Her mother had just passed away and that would have been the time Anne was pulled away from whatever job, or whatever life she was leading; care-free and full of hope. That would have been the time she was called back to duty from her other reluctant family members to care for her elderly and sick grandmother. That must have also been the time her dreams, however grand and obscure they might have been, were killed.

Sherlock scanned the floor and quickly deduced from the wear on the carpet which one belonged to Anne. The door was unlocked so he walked in, careful to be completely silent, less he disturb the elder Rutledge.

Now the only Rutledge.

Sherlock inhaled quickly and deeply, somewhat shocked by the state of the bedroom. One ancient wooden dresser, sporting more than its fair share of scars and water marks, seemed to vomit clothes onto the floor with erupting drawers of wrinkled blouses and pants and a whole motely of assorted wares which were not in the least bit organized. He stifled a laugh when he spotted a stack of folded laundry resting atop the mountain of overflowing clothes. The sheer hypocrisy was astounding.

On one end of the room, stacks and stacks of dime-store novels acted as pillars supporting boxes of even more novels which acted as a base for an old Nintendo gaming station with an antique copy of Super Mario Bros. still plugged into it. On the other end of the room a small desk stood alone, piled high with books, papers, make-up, hair accessories and one lonely pink laptop.

"There might have been a struggle here," Sherlock thought wading his way over clothes in an attempt to reach the childishly small, deflated mattress which was probably Anne's excuse for a bed. "But if there was, it might be near impossible to tell. What a disaster-zone!"

He scanned the bed: nothing. He searched under it and found almost ten half-filled water bottles, but otherwise nothing. He scanned the titles of the novels and found them to be mostly horror and romance novels, otherwise nothing. He attempted to swim through the laundry and see if there was anything important on the dresser: nothing.

"Now," he thought turning to the desk. "The most promising source of evidence."

He picked up the laptop and pried it open with his long fingers. He pushed the button and waited, eagerly, for the personal piece of technology to bring itself back to life.

It flashed to life with a sigh and a melodic chime. Sherlock knelt down until he was level with the desk and found that he could barely contain his excited energy; he was practically pulsating with excitement.

Then the computer asked innocently for a password.

#

Mrs. Rutledge sat on her faded, pastel sofa and alternated between sobbing in short, violent bursts and sighing in a long, mournful fashion into one spidery hand that clutched at her robust, rosy cheeks while the other hand slowly stroked on water-colored rose that adorned the cushion. The Detective-Inspector and the doctor sat opposite her on two mismatching leather chairs, one green, and one blood red, wondering how exactly they could help the woman deal with her grief, and more importantly how long they had to stall for time.

John scanned the room for a topic of conversation. In one corner on a shelf he saw a small statue of a man dressed in a suit of armor with a thin, narrow face and pointed beard proudly bearing the Spanish flag on a tall and crooked pole, but he was uncertain as to its purpose and unsure how to forge a conversation with it.

Luckily, Mrs. Rutledge looked up, and followed his gaze to the statue.

"Oh, that's one of the things Anne brought back from Spain. It's a statue of Don Quixote de la Mancha. He was always her favorite. We used to watch the cartoon together when she was little-little." Mrs. Rutledge sniffed and pushed the last few tears out of her eyes with her palms.

"I don't know what's come over me, you'll have to forgive me." she said in a trembling voice.

"Oh, no." John started to say "It's quite alright."

"Now, look at me! Mercy! I have guests and I haven't even offered them a beverage. I'll be right back chaps, don't you worry. I can't imagine, falling to pieces like that in front of company. What's come over me?" She smiled dreamily, stood up, wiped her face, and went to the kitchen.

John and Lestrade exchanged nervous looks, but said nothing.

"Oh, you'll have to forgive me; we're all out of biscuits. I told Anne to pick some up in case we had company, but she won't be home till about four. How will you gents feel about crackers and cheese?"

Lestrade grimaced painfully and John smiled sadly.

"Crackers would be fine ma'am." John said trying to keep his voice from shaking and cracking.

"Great, then we're all fine." She said. "I'll put the tea on while you chaps wait a bit, I won't be but a minute now."

John smiled and nodded, even though she could not possible see him; then he ducked down and whispered harshly to Lestrade "Now what?"

Lestrade threw up his hands and shrugged "I don't know."

"Do we tell her again?"

"I don't know."

#

Sherlock sat very, very still.

Except for his eyes. His eyes were swiveling madly, like those of a man possessed. Indeed, he did look demented; his face was contorted in the utmost concentration he could manage, his mouth was moving rapidly, but no words came out, and what words did manage to escape the trap of his lips in a shallow squeal sounded as though they were spoken in tongues.

"Capuzzo, Grisham, Sands, Kleypas, Quinn, Morning, Straub…" he whined, rolling his eyes back in his head as he raced briefly through his mind palace, found nothing, and jumped nimbly back into reality.

He was scanning every object in Anne's room in search of her password, and having no luck. None of the bands she liked had been the password, so Sherlock had moved onto authors and was busy scanning the names on the books she had amassed in her room.

He looked as though he were having a fit.

Finally he stumbled onto something interesting across the room. His eyes locked onto the slightly deviant detail and he leapt up, off of his knees and shot over the ocean of garbage that coated the floor of her bedroom.

It was an old, old paperback book. Thirty years old at least with yellow pages and faded ink. Sherlock picked it up and turned it over in his hands, scanning the outside with his eagle eyes. The spine was creased repeatedly and was on the verge of falling apart, so it had been opened often. The pages were more than yellow; they were brown on the edges with wear and reading. Obviously, it was her favorite book.

The cover illustration was a man made of paper, and clearly on fire. He covered his eyes with one hand, in an expression of utter despair and hopelessness, casting a shadow down his face. The other hand hung limply at his side, just barely clutching at a paper hat. His shoulders and arms were cloaked in tongues of yellow and white flames which crept up the cover to the red banner that ran along the edges. The book was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

But the wear wasn't all that caught Sherlock's eye. What he noticed most was the bright slips of paper jutting out of the top of the novel. One bright green paper declared, in neat, feminine handwriting "_Consider the lilies of the field_."

He flipped further in the book to one piece of fuchsia paper, placed almost at the end of the book. It said: "_The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time…One of them had to stop burning._"

And the last piece of paper was a creamy blue piece of fancily notarized parchment, acting as a bookmark. Nothing was written on it, but Sherlock scanned the page and stumbled when he came across a highlighted sentence: "_Everyone must leave something when they die."_

Sherlock shut the book and sneered, trying to wash away the sentiment with an intensified focus on The Problem. As he had hoped, a swell of warm understanding swept over the bite of sentiment and pride took the place of the nagging human feelings that were dragging down his investigation.

"So what did you leave?" he asked himself out loud taking the book with him back to the laptop. He smiled as he gazed on the command asking for a six digit password. With a little flourish he proudly typed in: ray451.

#

John and Lestrade at the crackers in silence. Mrs. Rutledge talked enough for the both of them.

"And she was just a dear back then, a perfect dear. I can't imagine what she'd be up to now a days. She'd been going to that dreadful school for so long; it's nice to have the dear back in England. And she's so attentive. I hated every minute she was in Spain, I was so sure she'd come back pregnant! Not that I'd mind, but now perhaps she could find a good Englishman to settle down with. Mercy! Where is that girl, she should be back by now? Well, never mind. But I say: where has the cat gotten off to? Wizard; did he run off again? Do you know?"

She stared at them both intently, waiting for an answer, so Lestrade shoved a whole cracker into his mouth and choked on the dry, stale saltine while John shook his head furiously.

"Well, that's alright. I never liked the cat anyway. There's something disloyal about a cat. They wear the same expression whether they've seen a mouse or an ax murderer. Ha-ha! Do you get the joke? Well, I suppose it wasn't that funny to begin with. But speaking of killers, that man that came in here on Wednesday last could have been one. A killer I mean, not an ax. That would have been funny. Can you imagine?"

Lestrade sat up a little straighter in his chair "Go on." He urged, barely curving his excitement and professional tone. "Tell me more about this man; the one that looked like a killer."

"Well, what do you want to hear about him for? He's just some chap what followed my sweet home one night."

"Uh, I might know him." Lestrade quickly lied. "Describe him for me."

"There's not much to say."

"Say it anyway."

"Short little man, like a clown, but wearing some expensive clothes. He smelled like the mall and he had the darkest eyes, like little dollops of chocolate." Mrs. Rutledge picked up a cracker and held it under her chin, intent on eating it, but making no motion to do so.

"I suppose he didn't look all that much like a killer after all. But he was a sweet little dear, I'll give him that. I just didn't like how he treated my Annie. I had half-a-mind to put him back on the streets."

"What did he do?"

"Oh, the scoundrel! Mercy! I'll never forget the day! He called my dearest a trollop! But he used the…"Here her voice dropped into a dangerous whisper "…other word. I'll never forget the day! I told him: If you come into my house and dare to talk to my family like that I'll have to throw you out. He was a dear after that! I'll tell you what!" She proudly puffed up her chest.

John leaned forward in his chair, ignoring the groaning, squealing sound of leather beneath his denim jeans. "Did he say what his name was?"

Mrs. Rutledge's eyes turned a bit misty and she put down her cracker, upsetting the cheese and sending it tumbling to the floor.

"He said he was Gregory Lestrade from Scotland Yard and he had some bad news about my Annie." She said quietly as tears glimmered in her eyes.

"And a doctor…" She choked a sob. "Oh, mercy! My Annie, my little-little…" she slammed her palms into her face and began crying anew, leaving a very confused, very distressed Detective Inspector and Doctor scrambling to comfort and calm the woman, wondering about the mysterious man and trying to decide whether he had relevance in their case or not.

#

Sherlock unplugged his small orange USB from the pink laptop and hurriedly stowed it into his coat pocket. He'd found what he had been searching for, but he didn't feel as though he had enough time to read through it all. He could hear Mrs. Rutledge's sobbing and hypothesized that Lestrade and John would want to escape from the mourning flat as quickly as possible. He _could_ take the laptop, but Lestrade was probably still mad from the last time he'd stolen evidence. He didn't feel like being yelled at, so he only took the files he needed and left the laptop where it had been.

He even put the book back neatly where it had been left: right on top of a mountain of discarded make-up.

He stood up and gave the room one cursory glance, checking for anything he might have missed.

"A person's bedroom is a reflection of their mind, and you can often tell the state of a person's mind from the state of their bedroom. For example, a bedroom with a broken window probably holds a person who does not feel secure, and a messy bedroom is a sign of a disorganized mind."

Sherlock kicked aside a few candy wrappers and a paper plate as he finished quoting his old criminal psychology textbook and pursed his lips. He had never wanted to get intimate with a victim; he never wanted to see them as anything more than a piece of the puzzle, yet somehow he had the feeling that he had leapt right into the core of Anne Rutledge's life. He probably knew her now better than most of her friends on the streets.

"_And what a great lot of good it'll do us now_." He thought creeping out the bedroom door and slinking down the peach hallway, paying no mind to the pictures which seemed to be gazing at him wearily from their black frames.

#

Mrs. Rutledge had forgotten Anne again and Lestrade and John were enjoying their third helping of crackers. Every few minutes Mrs. Rutledge would complain that she was not being a hospitable host and go and fetch a few more crackers from the kitchen.

John sheepishly accepted every cracker while Lestrade kept trying to insist Mrs. Rutledge sit down and calm herself and try to remember the man who came to visit Anne a few weeks ago. Her description of him changed slightly every time.

"He was a big tall man with dark hair wearing a polo shirt and grey khaki shorts."

"He was about my size with blond hair and an even tan."

"He was an Asian about four feet high with a scar along his neck."

John had given up ever getting Mrs. Rutledge to remember the right man and had silently accepted that Lestrade was going to stubbornly try to probe her memory while she struggled to remember correctly.

Every time Lestrade would tell her that her description had changed she would insist that she was describing the right man and tell him to shut up because she knew what she was doing. Every time she told the Detective-Inspector to shut up, John would smile.

"I'm sure, he was about six-foot high with a distended gut and greasy brown hair."

"Ma'am," Lestrade said patiently "Last time you said he was a four-foot tall Asian with a scar."

"I'm sure that this is the right man, He came in with my Annie around his arm." Mrs. Rutledge petulantly insisted.

Lestrade opened his mouth to speak, but Mrs. Rutledge cut him off.

"Shut up! I know exactly what I'm doing young man! If I say this is the man, then this is the man! Insolent little tart!"

John smiled.

Sherlock emerged from the hallway and immediately Mrs. Rutledge reached out to the stranger.

"You! Tell him I'm right!"

"You're right."

"Ha-Ha!" Mrs. Rutledge said triumphantly, puffing out her chest a bit. "I'm always right."

"Always." Sherlock muttered.

John instantly recognized when his friend had made some discovery by the disinterested and monotonous change in his tone and he turned around to find Sherlock slinking across the living room with his eyes firmly fixed on the stature of Don Quixote.

John scans up and down the bronzed statue, but he can find nothing odd about it. It's not until Sherlock was kneeling on the ground beside it that he realizes what his friend was on to.

"Oh, god." John whispered.

"What?" Lestrade asked immediately on alert, having worked with Sherlock long enough to sense when he has found something case-breaking.

"You must think we're bleeding idiots, Sherlock." John said as he rose and walked over to where he squatted; observing the wretched thing over his flat mate's shoulder.

"Yes, but that's not the point." Sherlock said.

"What are you on about?" Mrs. Rutledge asked picking up another cracker and holding it a few inches away from her face where it hovered, waiting for her to take a bite.

"God, we were sitting with it this whole time." John sighed as Lestrade joined his side.

"What the hell does it mean?"

Sherlock picked up the basket gently and placed it on the coffee table on top of a few fashion and crafting magazines, careful not to smudge the black stains that were splattered over the wicker.

If he knew his stains correctly, they had been red before they had dried.

He opened the basket and peered inside, noting the yellowed gloom that shot like needles of light onto the small flowers and clumps of sandy-white rocks that lined the bottom of the wood.

He reached inside and brushed the tips of his fingers against the white rocks, crushing them in between his forefinger and thumb and smearing the sugar-like powder all over his skin. His heart seemed to quicken with nervous anticipation and a craving that was all-too-familiar not to recognize.

He pulled his hand out and held the fingertips up to the light, marveling at how beautifully the crystals glittered in the dull lamplight, throwing rainbows into the open air.

"Cocaine." He said brushing away the powerful stimulant on his black coat, leaving a smear of powder.

John's breath caught in his chest as Sherlock reached back inside the basket with his twitching, eager fingers. He couldn't tell what excitement was from the case or what could be his old cravings welling up beneath the mask of indifference.

"Cocaine? In my house?" Mrs. Rutledge squealed "You scoundrels! Get that out! I'll not have recreation here!"

"Ma'am, it's alright, I happen to be a Detective-Inspector and this is an investigation." Lestrade reminded her flashing his badge.

"Investigation? Mercy! Let me get my good blouse on. I'll be back in a flash."

Sherlock removed his hands and pulled the flowers from the basket into the light. He held them out on his palm and let John and Lestrade scrutinize the small purple flowers that were dusty from a light powdering of cocaine.

"Thistles?"


	5. Chapter 5: The Significance of Thistles

**Forgive me for this buffer chapter, but I'll be leaving soon and I won't be back for a week. By the way; ****_Great calamity kittens! I've got FOLLOWERS!_**** I didn't think anyone would want to read this little tale of mine. Every fave/follow is an added minute to my life, ever reveiw is the golden fruit of my labors 3 Thanks people!**

* * *

"What?" Sherlock turned to John.

"Thistles; they're thistle flowers." John said pointing to the three stems drooping lazily in Sherlock's hand. "I know; they used to grow outside my house."

Sherlock gingerly plucked one flower away from the trio and examined the stalk, careful not to touch the spiky extensions protruding dangerously from around the flower itself. Lestrade eased a flower away from Sherlock as well, and examined it mulling over his extensive memory to see if he could recall any times a flower was found at a crime scene, or if he could recall the word 'thistle' ever being used.

John waited patiently for the two men to finish their observations, glancing every now and again at Mrs. Rutledge who had stood up to get more crackers from the kitchen but the little flowers caught his eyes like little purple stars and dragged his attention back to the one lone flower caught in Sherlock's iron grip; forgotten and ignored.

Thistles have no real petals, instead they have long, narrow tentacle-like protrusions that open similar to a flower, but have no real symmetry. The 'petals', although soft, look as sharp as needles. The rest of the flower is protected by bristles and more spikes, which makes the flower impossible to touch and very unattractive to look at.

John stared at the flower; a burst of creamy color that sat upon a throne of sickly-green thorns and was briefly reminded of his childhood home, where the thistle flowers grew in hordes and dominated his yard, making it impossible for him to roll around in his yard, or even run barefoot.

He had the distinct, unpleasant sensation that he had forgotten something important.

"The stems were cut, not just plucked." Sherlock said tossing the flowers back into the basket carelessly. "They were placed in the basket on purpose, probably to leave a message."

Lestrade gazed at his flower for one second more, but realized he wasn't coming up with any ideas and tossed his flower into the basket after Sherlock.

"What message?" he asked.

Sherlock clapped his hands together and rubbed them eagerly, almost greedily with a lurid gleam flashing through his blue eyes.

"I have no idea." He announced proudly.

John rolled his eyes. He knew that there was nothing Sherlock loved more than a good puzzle, and hated nothing more than being bored. The more pieces to the puzzle there were, the longer it would take to solve, and the longer Sherlock Holmes would be unraveling the mysteries and fleeing from his constant bane of boredom. At the moment he must have been over the moon with joy.

"Well, it looks like we're going to need to search the house anyway." Lestrade said scratching the back of his neck dejectedly. He was having a rough day, and it felt like no matter what he tried to do, all his efforts seemed wasted.

"Good." Sherlock said pulling his phone out of his pocket and jamming the shiny black screen with his thumb.

"No, not good." Lestrade attempted to explain, but he just shook his head. Sherlock wasn't listening and he didn't have the energy to try and argue his view of human decency to someone who couldn't care less either way.

"Come on John." Sherlock said looking up from his phone. "We'll be of more use at Baker Street than here."

"What?" John asked confused.

"Home. I want to go. Now." Sherlock said carefully and slowly.

"But don't you want to…" John began to ask if Sherlock wanted to have a longer look around, but at that moment Sherlock emitted a low noise of frustration and John gave up trying to understand his friend's motivation and settled for just following him until it all started to make sense.

John turned and waved goodbye to Lestrade just as Mrs. Rutledge came out of the kitchen with a new platter of crackers.

"Leaving so soon darlings? I just found some crackers. I'm sure Anne will be back any time with some proper biscuits, and then we can have a fine chat over biscuits and tea."

Lestrade looked at the women with a faint expression of horror, and turned back to Sherlock and John.

"You have to keep me informed when you find something Sherlock; it's my case and I'm letting you work it." Lestrade said in a pleading tone following John out into the hallway.

"And when I know something you'll be the third person I tell." Sherlock said kicking an umbrella that someone had left out in the hallway of the apartment, and looking up disinterestedly from his phone. The umbrella clattered to the floor, but Sherlock did not stop for more than the half-second necessary for him to move his foot out of the path of the troublesome obstacle. John had to stop, bend down, pick the umbrella up, and prop it against the wall where it had been innocently waiting and by the time he looked up Sherlock was gone.

John glanced at Lestrade who had let his head sink into his hands.

"I'll keep you informed." He promised the haggard Detective Inspector.

"Much appreciated." Lestrade said, though his eyes did not reflect the sentiment.

John found Sherlock outside, leaning against the cab he had called to take them back to Baker Street. His nose was still buried in his phone.

"You know, we're single handedly maintaining the cab industry in London. Together we must be buffering the whole cab economy." John said.

Sherlock grunted.

John climbed into the cab and waited for Sherlock, who was still leaning against the side of the cab with his nose still buried in his phone.

"Are you coming or what?" he asked.

Sherlock grunted.

"Would you stop grunting and come on?"

Sherlock grunted twice.

"Whatever you're doing, can't you do it in the cab?"

Sherlock didn't make a sound, but stood very still, determined not to move from where he was leaning against the cab with his nose still buried in his phone.

The cabbie, in his infinite kindness leaned out his window and addressed Sherlock in the most condescending and bitter tone he could manage under the circumstances.

"Hey pal, the meter's runnin, y'know?"

Sherlock grunted in reply.

A few seconds later the cabbie's remark seemed to register and Sherlock unburied his nose from his phone and stood up straight, no longer needing the support of the cab. He still absentmindedly stroked the screen with his thumb, scrolling the white webpage he was on, but he didn't look down at it until he was in the cab.

"221b Baker Street." He said sternly.

"Yes sir." The cabbie muttered under his breath "weirdo." He added some seconds later in an even quieter tone as the cab pulled away from the curb and pushed its way into the London traffic.

This happened to be the same cabbie that had dropped them off at the hospital that morning. He recognized the strange couple as soon as he had pulled up to the apartment, but wisely said nothing, because he thought it was one hell of a creepy coincidence and he really did not want them to remember him. Coincidences like that never happen in real life, and hopefully, the cabbie thought, they will never happen again.

John watched the buildings crawl by his window as they crept forward through London traffic. Each cream, white and beige building hid a person, each person hid a family, and each family hid a story. John wondered; in a half-dreamy, half contemplative fashion, if he were to remove the roofs from each house and to peer into the lives of every person in London for a short time, what would he see?

The cab drove by a man in a large gray overcoat talking on his phone. John almost looked right through him, and probably would have ignored him altogether if he hadn't been in an introspective frame of mind. He observed the man, and tried to gather up everything about him. Not an old man, but with salt-and-pepper hair and more worry creases than a man his age should have. Laugh lines around his mouth made deep parenthesis into his face and the gold ring on his finger shone like a sun when it caught a flash of light.

"I wonder what his life's been like." John thought as the man was swept away by the wave of gray buildings that surged as the cab experienced a temporary increase of speed.

For some reason, acting off of some instinct John turned to face Sherlock. Sherlock however had retreated into his Mind Palace and had left a note on his shoulder, torn out of his pocket note book in haste.

John picked up the paper, yellowed with artificial age (experiment) and read the snatch of a sentence.

"Mind Palace, BRB."

Sherlock's eyes were closed and his hands were held up in an almost reverent salute, fingers stretching towards the sky and curling in random patterns. Suddenly he would wave his hand and with a flick of his wrist banish a thought or memory to someplace deep, deep, deep within his subconscious. Somewhere where it could never bother him again.

John would normally leave the room and let Sherlock frolic around his thoughts for a time, but the cab was moving and he had no desire to leave so he sat and watched him work with his invisible thoughts until Sherlock had a sudden revelation.

He suddenly flinched, as though he'd been hit with something hard; his face, which until then had been screwed in concentration, melted into a visage of exasperation and relief. He jolted again, causing the cab seat to groan slightly with surprise and he turned to John.

He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out. Instead he pulled out his phone and began to compose a text.

"What've you got?" John asked.

"Scotland Yard." Sherlock said.

"Oh." John waited patiently for Sherlock to explain himself, content with being left in the dark while Sherlock pulled all of the pieces together in his mind.

Sherlock sent the text and settled back into his seat, puzzled, but on the whole satisfied. It wasn't often he had something weird like thistles appear in a case, but it made catching the killer easier. He'd make sure to do his own private searches while Lestrade was combing the computers at the Yard.

"Scotland Yard what?" John asked, recognizing the far off look in Sherlock's eyes as a sign that soon his thoughts would carry him away.

"Hmm?"

"What did you mean by Scotland Yard? What's so significant about the Yard that you had to text Lestrade."

"Oh," Sherlock waved his hand around importantly "Simple. Thistles are the national flower of Scotland. And there are three feet in a yard."

John arranged the information in his mind, and then suddenly it all clicked. "Scotland Yard."

"Precisely." Sherlock mused.

"So what does that have to do with anything?"

Sherlock scoffed "Think John, think! This man runs up to Scotland Yard with a body and basically _challenges_ the police to find him. He's being very brash and very up front about it, don't you think? And now he leaves a message which can only mean Scotland Yard. It's obviously a personal vendetta against the whole police force. All Yarders."

"So…" John looked up and locked eyes with the cabbie, who had been watching them through the mirror as he became drawn into their conversation.

"So, we're not looking for a normal criminal. This man feels that he is smarter than all of Scotland Yard, and he's set out to prove it. This seems bitter, so I'll say that this man attempted to join the police but wasn't accepted. Probably due to his arguable scores on the various mental health exams. This is not only revenge, but also a chance to flaunt his pride and show what a good cop he might've made if he'd been on the right side of the law. He's crafty, dramatic, and he probably knows all of the standard police tactics as well as how to divert the entire police force if necessary.

"He knows all of the Yard's weaknesses and he's just psychotic enough to exploit them. I'll bet this isn't his last murder either. No, no..." Sherlock broke off until his voice was a mellow hum.

"No, he's too clever to get caught. Clever, clever, clever… he'll kill again and this time he'll make it even more obvious. He'll be laughing as the police scramble to solve the murder. He thinks he's clever."

Sherlock's eyes seemed to glow as he brought his hands up to his chin and calmly pressed each fingertip together.

"That's the frailty of genius John, it needs an audience." He said with a chilling finality.

"The only thing is…I guess you never know whose watching." John said turning to look out to the city that he had been scrutinizing. It seemed a duller place after their conversation.

The cabbie was too happy to let them out. They seemed nice enough, but they dealt with killers and such things that he preferred not to think about. Plus they were weird. It wasn't worth the fee to deal with a few odd balls for a few minutes. Sure he could use the money, and sure the conversation was good, but the last time he'd picked up a couple of blokes chatting about the Yard and bodies, someone had started shooting up his cab, and he'd almost become one of those bodies.

No, thank you. The next time a man in a black belstaff coat hailed him on the streets he would just keep driving.

###

* * *

**By the way, the cabbie is just a cabbie, I'm not one of those people who make the bad guy the cabbie just to keep tradition. He's just an ordinary bloke with no ties to Moriarty, or Mycroft, or Sherlock what-so-ever. Well, okay; he did bump into Moriatry at a coffee shop when he was "Jim from IT" but it wasn't significant enough for either of them to remember. **


	6. Chapter 6: Mr Korbes

**Sorry this is late. Well, no I'm not. I've been killing myself with homework. People belong to not me.**

* * *

Sherlock paid for the cab and gathered the cabbie's features in a glance. He seemed familiar, but Sherlock just couldn't place his face. It was incredibly frustrating and he sighed in annoyance.

John was waiting at the door when the cab drove off, petrified and standing in his familiar military-style stance that he adopted when danger was adrift in the air.

"What is it?" Sherlock asked recognizing the signs of alertness in his flat mate immediately.

John pointed to the shiny gold lock that rose out of the ebony black of the door like a precious island in a sea of tar.

"Scratch marks. Someone's picked our lock." His finger hovered over the offending marks; great yellowish fissures that split the pitch-black paint. "Rather crudely too, I'd say."

Sherlock took in the gouges at a glance and made a few off-hand deductions. "Medium build, lots of upper arm strength, professional lock picking kit."

"Hang on; I thought the good lock-picks don't leave marks?" John asked.

"They don't, unless you use them wrong." Sherlock said looking up from the street to the window of their flat. He could see no movement.

"In other words," he straightened his coat and stretched his shoulders casually "An amateur."

"Ah." John nodded, cracking his knuckles and fighting the urge to grin. He wished he had brought his gun, but it was too late for wishes now.

Carefully, John opened the door and peered inside. There was no sign of the intruder on the ground floor, so he silently made his way inside, walking on the tips of his toes. Sherlock stalked after him, as effortlessly quiet as a breath of wind.

At the bottom of the stairs Sherlock and John took off their coats noiselessly, stifling even the lightest of rustling with painstaking care. John caught Sherlock's eye and mouthed "Mrs. Hudson?" nervously, but Sherlock nodded and pointed to the back of the flat. His hearing was more acute than John's and he could pick up the murmuring of her daytime soaps and the ringing noise of her tea cup as it left the china saucer and glided to her pursed lips.

"Fine." He mouthed back.

The sudden groaning of wood overhead brought their attention back to their flat. A trail of creaking and a steady thumping assured them that someone was definitely in their waiting room; pacing up and down nervously by the sound of it.

Sherlock looked at John, his face a mask of indifference, save for the glimmering flare of excitement that made his ice-blue eyes glow like two brilliant stars floating in orbs of milk. A hint of a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

He made a gesture in the air with one finger raised, and gently he placed the finger to his lips, motioning for silence.

Like a cat, Sherlock prowled up the stairs, clinging to the wall where the wood was less likely to groan. John followed two steps behind him, careful to step where he stepped, watching every surprisingly delicate footstep from his flat mate with rapt attention.

Sherlock slid in front of the door to their flat, his hand hovering over the wood in sweet anticipation. He paused and waited for John to join him at the door before gently-so gently- placing his fingers around the golden knob and sliding the tips over the smooth, cold metal.

He turned the knob slowly; as fast as he could without making a sound, but still, far too slowly. He felt to the gears clamoring together and the creaking of the old metal inside the wood and thought to himself: "_It sounds like a car wreck, squealing and crashing apart."_

John, though, heard the same metal clicking together and thought it sounded like the gates at a dog track, preparing to collapse with an enormous crash, dogs and people bumping into the gate and jarring the metal in nervous anticipation. The silence of the gates was always the harbinger of the race, the proverbial calm before the storm.

Now the abysmally small whining of the metal stopped, and Sherlock stopped turning the knob. He listened.

Nothing.

Sherlock opened the door wide, careful to insure that the door acted as a barrier between him and whoever was pacing their sitting room, just in case.

He quickly peered around the door of their flat, taking in their intruder in a glance and hummed with interest.

He carelessly sauntered into the flat, just as he would've on any normal day and with a wave of his hand beckoned John to do the same.

John stared at his flat mate curiously, wondering whether or not he could rely on Sherlock's discretion of danger, but ultimately he followed him into the flat and caught his first good glimpse of the situation.

"Oh." John said blankly, trying his best to gather his wits about him as he struggled to deal with the shock.

"Yes. Oh." Sherlock said stepping into the room cautiously, where, only hours before, he and John had been chatting idly over a cup of tea. Said cup of tea was now a cold, brown puddle on the wooden floor.

"How did he get here?" John asked stepping up to the body that sat, slouched in his chair by the fireplace.

"I would suspect that the window being ajar might have a considerable weight on my deduction." Sherlock said as he knelt down and picked up the head of the corpse carefully. The bleach-blond hair flopped sickly in matted locks around the chiseled face of the man, whose eyes, Sherlock discovered to his faint horror and surprise, were open wide with shock.

"Who is he?" John asked, working around Sherlock to get a good look at the gaping chasm that had been pounded into the man's head. Evidently he'd either fallen from a great height, or had been killed by blunt force trauma to the skull.

"Give me a moment." Sherlock demanded reaching into the dead man's coat pocket and rummaging for his affects. The shiny gray material of his suit made a tremendous rustling and Sherlock made a mental note about the cheap material of his suit.

He pulled out an ID and a wad of twenties as thick as one of John's sea-faring novels. The money he gave a cursory view, noting only that it was held together with a pink rubber band and that the money was straight and crisp; probably ironed. Trademark of drug dealers or gang dealings, not much else.

The ID required actual scrutiny; it stated that the corpse was one Robert Korbes, age thirty-five, born in August 1971.

Immediately red flags rose in Sherlock's mind. A thirty-five year old born in the early seventies? Only if he's a time traveler too! Sherlock played with the weight of the card in the palm of his hand and tested it's thickness in between his forefinger and thumb. It was much too thin to be a real license, though the weight was just about right.

"Bought a cheap ID." Sherlock tallied up his recordings in his mind, and prepared for a few more rounds of deductions before he called Lestrade.

"So someone dumped the body? Are they still here?" John whispered.

"I don't think so." Sherlock said, matching his friend's low tone, but refusing to use more than a stage whisper.

He stood up and surveyed their living room one last time, picking out the minute details he had missed on his way in and finished tailoring the conclusion he had hurriedly made upon discovering the body.

"Newspapers are knocked down here." He waved his hands over the offending recyclables, which had collapsed in an avalanche and slid over the floor towards the window.

"Tea is knocked over here." Sherlock said, carefully stepping over the puddle in his expensive leather shoes and following the trail of debris to the open window, where the silken drapes murmured excitedly in the London breeze.

"Someone picked the lock, came upstairs with the body, placed him down…" He turned and traced the pattern of movement with his bony forefinger; the door, zigzagging upstairs, and a flick to where the body lay. John watched absently, concerned more for the large maroon stain that had been soaking into the upholstery of his chair than the particular nature of the corpse that had made it.

"This…no…" Sherlock stopped mid-deduction and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"What? What's wrong?" John asked, slightly alarmed.

"He waited for us, they waited for us here… why would they do that?" Sherlock shook his head slightly, shaking up sediment and stirring his thoughts over in his mind until something floated to the surface that he could scoop up and use.

"They were pacing when we came in; we heard them." He said, almost pleading with John to confirm his thoughts.

"Yes, I know, but…"

"But as soon as we came up stairs, they ran across the flat…" Sherlock cut a swift line through the living room with his pale, hard finger, tracing the trail with a glowing path in his mind. "…knocking over papers and this cup, out the window and down the fire escape."

"Are you sure?"

Sherlock gave John a swift, angry look. A glance which stated condescendingly "_Am I sure? Are you asking this right now? Really?"_

"Okay, sorry." John put his palms up and stepped away from the body. "I just want to know if there are still killers in our flat."

"Just me and you."

"That's not funny." John said flatly.

Sherlock pretended not to notice John's displeasure and instead rifled through the pockets of the late Mr. Korbes a bit deeper.

Here are the things he found:

One wallet, with the name 'Robert' embroidered in loopy gold letters, library card inside with the neat, boxed, handwritten 'Bob Korbes' blaring brilliantly in red ink, and a bookmark with a short verse of poetry pressed into the cardstock.

"On Mr. Korbes a call to pay.

And that is where we go today."

Sherlock turned these over with some interest, his mind pricking at every mention of the name, immediately recognizing it from somewhere, yet not quite recalling it exactly. It was infuriating.

He kept searching until his fingertips lighted on something plastic and deflated. He recoiled from the soft rustle of the bag and forced himself to delve deeper and seize the thing with three of his pale, trembling fingers. The hiss of particles being shifted made his heart beat slightly quicker, as he pushed his thoughts away and focused only on the facts.

The fact was that the dead man had a pocket full of cocaine.

"Sherlock…what is that?" John asked, blanching at the sight of the white sand inside the crumpled plastic bag.

"Cocaine. A lot of it." Sherlock put it beside the other artifacts on the coffee table and continued his search.

"Cocaine… so do you think this guy might've had something to do with the other…"

"Yes." He cut John off as he pulled out another bag from the hidden pocket on the inside of the man's jacket.

This bag had less powder in it, but it had a large yellow sheet of index paper inside.

"Sherlawk and Jawn." John read. He gave an anxious groan and crossed his arms.

"Why? Why would they wait for us, and then leave us a message?" Sherlock asked himself mostly.

"Uh, maybe to satisfy their ego?" John began counting off reasons on his fingers, curling one finger in for every conceivable reason he could think of. "To throw us a red herring, to snub the police, because he's a nut killer and he thinks it's fun?"

"All logical, but all wrong." He snapped. "No, no it's got something to do with the name."

"What? Korbes?"

"Korbes… why is it so familiar?" Sherlock hissed into his palm and he pressed his fingers against his brow and pushed into his skin, kneading the frustration away with small rotations of his thin fingers.

"I'm not sure." John said.

Sherlock sank into a puckered silence, his Mind Palace beckoning him with the allure of things yet unseen and a sanctuary to organize his cluttered observations.

"Hang on; I thought you might want to see this before Lestrade gets here." John summoned Sherlock back from the cusp of his Mind Palace with a mesmeric wave of his hand.

"And we _are_ calling Lestrade. This is his division."

"But we _just _left him, John!"

"Just be quiet and look; on the back of his neck." John ushered Sherlock to the back of his chair and with one tight circle drew a ring around the area of attention: a large, purple, swollen _mark_ that rose from the rest of the pale neck.

"What is that?" Sherlock asked, half amused, half concerned as he leaned in to peer at the hideous wound.

"Puncture wound." John adopted his best doctor-voice, sounding all at once informed and reassuring. "A syringe or something filled with, I assume, some form of paralytic, which would cause a minor allergic reaction around the point of entry."

"Wrong." Sherlock said, brushing aside. "I think you've stumbled onto the cause of death."

"An injection?" John asked.

"Yes, here at the back of the neck, an injection of poison, lethal, and a few seconds later, just to be sure, something hard to the back of the head."

"There's too much blood for the head wound to be a secondary cause of death." John said, noting once again, the smear of blood that he would have to find a way to clear out of his chair before he could even humor sitting in it again.

"He was still alive when he was smashed." Sherlock made the motion of bashing the man once with an invisible rock, playing out the crime in his mind, just as it must have happened. "He bled, but the poison…"

"We'll get Molly to see to that." John said pulling out his phone and dialing Lestrade.

###


End file.
